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The Book of Qustul, unearthed in the Nubian desert at the beginning of the twentieth century, told the story of Mâlik, a Persian warrior who fought in Cambyses II’s conquest of Egypt in 525 BC and whose journey home became an extraordinary odyssey with consequences far beyond his own time.

The book presented a mystery of its own. Experts considered it an OOPART—an out-of-place artifact—because it was dated to around the fifth century BC, yet its pages were written in English.

More than a century later, a team of archaeologists funded by the Nethuns Corporation follows the clues preserved in its pages to an ancient temple buried beneath the Nubian sands. There, a curse guards a discovery that links Mâlik’s journey to modern cosmology—and to the mystery of an inverted pyramid.